Articles

The Digital Leviathan: Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies

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Abstract

This introduction to the special issue investigates the concept of digital sovereignty at the intersection of political philosophy, media theory, and Critical AI and Data Studies. While sovereignty has traditionally been tied to the nation state, current debates—ranging from platform governance and data capitalism to the discourse on Sovereign AI—demonstrate that power is increasingly mediated by corporate infrastructures and algorithmic systems. Revisiting Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and its medial figuration of sovereignty, the article traces how sovereignty has always been articulated through representational practices and visual strategies. Building on actor-network theory, the article argues that digital sovereignty must be understood as a distributed, recursive, and conditional phenomenon: it emerges through socio-technical mediations across data life cycles, platform infrastructures, and algorithmic practices. The analysis develops a framework for examining how sovereignty is reconfigured under digital conditions, highlighting both its paradoxical specificity and its entanglement with data objects, infrastructural dependencies, and media imaginaries. In this way, the paper positions digital sovereignty as a central object of inquiry for Critical AI and Data Studies, offering conceptual tools to address its practices, infrastructures, and theories through the contributions gathered in this special issue.

Keywords: Digital Sovereignty, Critical AI Studies, Data Studies, Media Theory, Thomas Hobbes, Data Life Cycle, Actor–network theory (ANT)

How to Cite:

Thielmann, T. & Borbach, C., (2025) “The Digital Leviathan: Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies”, communication +1 11(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/cpo.3521